There have been and continue to be an alarming number of deaths caused as a result of infants and young children being inadvertently left in child seats secured within hot motor vehicles. These tragedies could easily have been avoided by the use of a vehicle installed child monitoring system, designed to provide notice to the driver of the presence of a child.
The prior art proposes a variety of systems which may be utilized to detect an infant who remains in a car seat. However, none of the systems are currently in place in motor vehicles. This may be explained by the fact that many of the systems are impractical, are difficult to install, are expensive, and/or simply do not work properly. Significantly, all these prior systems are designed to be permanently installed in vehicles. And car, mini-van and SUV manufacturers have not yet found it economical to incorporate such systems into new models. The placement of permanent installations into existing vehicles is also not practical and retrofitting vehicles is expensive.